Every journey has a beginning, and mine began during a U.S. Air Force commander’s first week on the job. He called a staff meeting and told everyone that things had to change for the organization to succeed, and “lean” was the solution. Everyone in the room looked dazed and confused, wondering what this incoming commander was referring to. The question was quickly answered when he placed James P. Womak’s and Daniel P. Jones’ Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster Audio, 2003) on the conference room table.
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Initially, after reading the book and doing some basic research, many within the organization thought it seemed great for manufacturing and private businesses, but were curious to see how lean was going to apply within a military environment. So we did what many companies do when faced with a situation that is beyond their area of expertise: We hired a consultant from a contracted company who was well versed in lean Six Sigma.
The consultant scheduled a meeting with the staff and started from the beginning—the history of Six Sigma, the five principles of lean, as well as some basic quality management tools. The consultant became our sensei, or teacher, and he instructed us on how to make use of the available quality management tools. Methodically, we began building our lean Six Sigma toolboxes. After some time we realized that lean Six Sigma could be applied to countless situations and used anywhere within our organization. To put our recently acquired skill sets to the test, we began with an internal transactional process that was important not only to the organization as a whole, but also to our new commander specifically. The first lean Six Sigma initiative undertaken within our organization was our appraisal system.
Headquarters had established a corporate goal for the appraisal system of ensuring that performance reports were completely processed in no more than 20 days. The problem was that 41 percent of the time, our organization was not processing appraisal reports per the corporate goal. To properly evaluate the process, an initial lean Six Sigma team was assembled, which included a Six Sigma Champion, a process owner, team leader, subject matter experts, and the customer. Once the initial group was assembled, our sensei facilitated a kaizen event during which we methodically analyzed and reviewed the inner workings of the current process.
The results were phenomenal. After attempting to map out the current state of the appraisal system, we discovered that not a single individual working within the process could provide the lean Six Sigma team with a standardized way of conducting business. Each functional area within the organization performed the same process differently. The lean Six Sigma team then performed root cause analyses on the problems identified during the data collection and current-state mapping exercises. The team uncovered a lengthy laundry list of root causes, identifying many areas of concern that certainly impeded the appraisal system process. These findings surprised many on the team–especially those who had found nothing wrong with the process. After briefing the new commander on the lean Six Sigma team’s results and proposed countermeasures, the team was told to immediately move forward with the proposed solutions. We all left the room eager to implement the newly discovered solutions.
Implementing and validating the standard work within several areas of the organization was the team’s initial task. Checklists from each functional area were developed using the future state map from the kaizen and circulated throughout the organization. Each individual involved in the appraisal process was responsible to follow his applicable checklist. Team members then addressed single-piece flow and pull, the second and third items on the action plan. The old process operated under batch and queue, with a majority of the members waiting until the end of the week to send the appraisal reports downstream. The team created an automated kanban process to notify the next individual downstream that the appraisal report was ready for processing, and only then was the report sent.
The next step was to establish a balanced workload for the process. Under the old process, 65 percent of the appraisal reports came due during the spring and summer months. Team members worked with the commander’s support staff, equivalent to the human resources department, to balance the yearly appraisal report due dates and create a process to ensure the due dates on new members to the organization were properly scheduled within the new set requirements. During the next couple of months, the team and individuals throughout the organization worked on tasks outlined from the action plan until all were completed.
Let me fast forward to six months after the event. The revised appraisal system process reflected significant improvements, and all the items implemented were received by a majority within the organization. Did we stumble within the first few months? Absolutely. It took courage on the part of the Six Sigma Champion and the process owner to urgently implement the solutions and continue providing support, even after the initial deployment. It took the team leader and team members’ courage to continue fighting through the wall of resistance that was initially met and determination to continue to implement the changes. In the end, we all pulled through as a team, and the organization was better for it. We managed to not only achieve a 97-percent on-time appraisal process rate, but also standardize the entire process throughout the organization.
This event taught many of us that lean Six Sigma works, and even more important, that it could work outside the manufacturing sector. Many of us continued to learn other process improvement models and methodologies: design for Six Sigma, theory of constraints, and business process engineering, among others. We found that all these tools correlate well in the effort of improving processes throughout any part of a service or transitional organization.
The Department of Defense has seen process improvement initiatives successfully implemented throughout every functional area and many organizations around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. The military continues to prove that process improvement can be done anywhere and anytime. In the end, our team and organization proved that no matter what functional area was involved, as long as there was a process, there was an opportunity to improve.
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